I vow that when I am at the Clintons’ in Surrey I scarcely dare offer the girls so much as a muffin, and if I ask the carroty one, Beatrice, the simplest question, she blushes and stammers as if I were proposing out of hand.  But what am I to do?  I can’t sing and take to serenading Edith on moonlit nights with a guitar and a blue ribbon around my neck.  I can’t push her into the river that I may pull her out again.  I dare say there is nothing for it but to adopt the American method,—­enter with about fifty others for a sort of sentimental steeple-chase, elbow or knock every other fellow out of the way in the running, work awfully hard to please the girl, and get in by half a length, if one wins at all.  There is no feeling sure of her until one is coming back from the altar, evidently.”

Some of his conversations with Edith were certainly anything but encouraging.  At other times he felt morally sure that she shared that derangement of the bivalvular organ technically defined as “a muscular viscus which is the primary instrument of the blood’s motion,” whose worst pains are said to be worth more than the greatest pleasures.  He was very much in earnest, and entirely straightforward, There were no balancing indecisions now, but the most downright affirmation of preference.  His little speeches were not veiled in rosy clouds of metaphor and poetry and distant allusions, like Captain Kendall’s, nor did they flow out in an unfailing stream of romantic eloquence, like that gifted warrior’s.  They were so honest and so clumsy, indeed, that Edith could not help laughing at them merrily sometimes, to his great discomfiture, consisting as they did chiefly of such statements as, “You know that I am most awfully fond of you.  I was tremendously hard hit from the first.  If you don’t believe me, you can ask Ramsay.  I told him all about it.  You aren’t in the least like any other girl that I have ever known, except Mrs. De Witt a little.  I suppose you know that I would have married her at the dropping of a hat if I could have done so.  But that is all over now.  I care an awful lot for you now, and shall be quite frightfully cut up if you won’t have anything to say to me,—­I shall, really.  I have got quite wrapped up in you, upon my word.  And I shall be intensely glad and proud if you will consent to be my wife.”

When Edith failed to take such speeches as these seriously, poor Mr. Heathcote was quite beside himself, and, in reply to her bantering accusations as to his being “a great flirt” and not “really meaning one word that he said,” opposed either burly negation or a deeply-vexed silence.  They looked at so many things differently that they found a piquant interest in discussing every subject that came up.

“There go May Dunbar and Fred Beach,” she said to him one Sunday as they were coming home from church.  “Isn’t he handsome?  They have been engaged three years.  Did you ever hear of such constancy?”